Hobbiton double wedding ring. I may be nuts.

One of the things I do when I'm a bit sad or overwhelmed is disappear into Peter Jackson's films of Tolkein, so recently I've been watching a LOT of the Hobbit.  It's not hard to explain why it's a comfort (provided you don't watch quite to the end).  It's got magic, and swordfights, and several outrageously hot sons of Durin, plus a Bowman, and beautiful scenery, and cosy hobbit smials.

I dunno about you, but I certainly would.

And while I was thinking about Bag End something struck me.  Hobbit architecture is mostly based on circles - rings, if you will.  I've never attempted a Double Wedding Ring quilt but it's been on my bucket list for a while, as I suspect it is for most Quilters.  It's one of those things You Should Do.

What better quilt for snuggling under in my own pseudo-smial than a nice hobbitish double wedding ring?  I dug out all my green and yellow scraps, those being the preferred colours of hobbits according to J.R.R, and got stuck in.  Paper piecing is a very soothing pastime so it's doubly perfect for me right now.



...I am vaguely thinking of piecing in one plain gold ring in the bottom right hand corner.  Is that too geeky?  Oh, who am I kidding.  As if there were any such thing.

Going with Flo

Ta dah!  A quilt top, finished, for Siblings Together.  I learned a fair bit from this one, I think - not least the differences between what "a 1/4" seam" means on various sewing machines.  In retrospect, a block that required precisely matched seams may not have been a sensible choice.

There are, certainly, a few places on the quilt where four blocks meet in perfect synchronicity:

And there are a few places where it looks more like this:

I will admit, my perfectionist heart sank when I started pinning blocks together, and for nearly a whole row I wrestled with trimming and easing and generally tweaking to try to make everything exactly as I had imagined it.  And then I remembered a very wise lady whom I worked with several years ago.  Her name was Tracey, and when things didn't quite turn out as planned, she was often known to say (in her wonderfully soft, soothing voice) "Go with Flo.  She's a good girl, is Flo, she'll see you right."

So I did, and I'm glad of it.  It's a beautiful quilt top, with all the quirks and individualities of the people who made it.  The pattern still shines out just as I hoped it would, and I think the effect is fresh and friendly.  I am hugely grateful to the very skilled and very generous members of the ST2 bee.  And it has the Moosh seal of approval too.

It's also HUGE - that's it spread out over our super-king sized bed - and I've never quilted anything this big before.  There is every chance that I won't finish it before the Siblings Together retreat...  but if I don't, I can comfort myself that I have at least contributed.  A while back I dug a few finished quilt tops out of the midden of my workroom that I'd completely forgotten about (I KNOW) and asked if anyone would be willing to quilt them up for ST2.  The very wonderful Sue stepped up and has finished all three!

This one was a sort of scrappy, inverted Irish Chain quilt that I put all my most cheerful scraps into and then forgot about.

This one has a ton of Denyse Schmidt Shelburne Falls in it.  I was finally making something for ME, and I painstakingly devised a block, then set it on point, and just as I was finishing up the top I realised that there would've been a vastly easier way of creating the same effect without having to deal with a million bias edges.  I promptly fell utterly out of love with it, despite the fabrics.  Whoops.

And this last one is entirely made of Madrona Road, intended as a showcase for the range back when I briefly dabbled in selling fabric.  I still really love this range.

But more to the point, isn't Sue a hero?!  I got to do the fun bit and then she's made them actually useful!  Three cheers for Sue!  Fingers crossed I can quilt up that beast at the top and we'll make it 4 finished quilts for the retreat.  Wish me luck...

OH LAWKS

Of course, the ridiculous thing is that while I haven't blogged for months, I have been sewing like a mad thing the entire time.

In the spirit of my "use stuff up" project, I've been doing 12.5" quilt-as-you-go blocks for the wonderful Soy Amado project:

And I made some pot-holders for a wonderful friend of mine who got married last week in the US.  I wish I could've been there but from what I've seen it was a fab day and she made a gorgeous bride.

And I've joined a real actual sewing bee!  The Siblings Together Bee (mk 2), where we make 2 x 12.5" blocks per month for a year.  These are November's rainbow coloured slab blocks, although I got a bit carried away and made 3...

I also made a commissioned toddler quilt which I didn't even take a photo of, and half a dozen baby quilts for Project Linus which will go to the Calderdale babies ICU.  I didn't take photos of those either.  I am USELESS!

Worst of all, I've realised I never posted the finished Bear Quilts.  So here they are, two disappearing nine-patch quilts in "Indie Chic" by Riley Blake fabrics and a few stash bits and Kona solids, for a pair of twin boys:

Here's a close-up of the Bear Block at the top of each quilt (based on this block at Quilter's Cache, but tweaked a bit for my purposes):

Each quilt had a little teddybear to go with it, made from a Love Patchwork & Quilting pattern.   Unfortunately the bears had to be posted off before the quilts were finished, so I didn't get a proper photo, but I managed this one while the quilt tops were still on the design wall:

There, that'll do for this post.  Now let's see how long before I post again...

Tumbler Quilt

I'd never made one before, but there's a lovely one by Poppy Makes in Issue 5 of Love Patchwork & Quilting magazine (which is brilliant, by the way - very fresh and not as twee as most crafting mags) and decided to have a bash.  I had a mass of fabric remnants in blue, yellow, and green, which felt suitably springlike, so I set to.

I have no idea where this deer fabric came from but isn't it cute?

By glorious serendipity, just after I started chopping them out, I happened upon a Designer's Guild white cotton sheet in our local charity shop which had an embroidered border of flowers... in green, blue and yellow.  So that's where the top and bottom borders of this one come from, and the backing!

However, I've been holding off on showing you all this one until I could add a final, rather special, finishing touch.

LOOK AT THAT.  Pretty cunning, don't you think?  All thanks to Woven Monkey, which basically seems to be a UK-based version of the famous Spoonflower.  The postage was quick, the prices, though not cheap, aren't too eye-watering, and the quality seems fine to me.

And if you're interested in buying it, I'll be putting this quilt up in my Etsy shop as soon as I finish this post.  If I can work out how.  It's fine, I'll be fine.  Probably.

No rest for the wicked, though.  Next week with any luck I shall be showing you the result of these late night headaches...

Still playing with the last of those linen scraps...

This is a very quick and dirty laptop cover.  There's a layer of batting for protection but no quilting or fastening, just a basic fabric envelope.

I actually started this a few months ago before a holiday in France, but I managed to sew it so that the bunnies were upside-down, and it annoyed me so much I unpicked it as soon as we got home.  And now at last it is finished.  Perhaps that means I should go on holiday again...

A Cushion

I was seized with the desire to make a cushion this weekend.  Recently we re-did our sitting room and I got a bit carried away with making everything co-ordinate in shades of yellow and grey, and having finished, I've decided it's a bit matchy, and some more random is called for.

I had a rootle through my home decor weight and linen scraps - most of which have come from scrap rolls - and put the following pile together.

It sewed up pretty quickly - I used big chunks because these fabrics fray so quickly, and just pieced them randomly.  My favourite kind of quilting if I'm honest.  For the back, I used the daisies and the guitars since they were the only bits left that were big enough, and this rather brilliant zip tutorial from Fiona at the Village Haberdashery.

(I'm not showing you the rest of the room just at the moment because it is A MIDDEN.)

 

Then I decided it was about time we got some cats on this blog.  So I took it upstairs to the bedroom where Deeley (the black one) and Marsha (the tortoiseshell one) are usually sleeping and tried to pose them nicely with it.

Marsha was having none of it.

Deeley, meanwhile, despite being black and usually quite hard to photograph, obligingly sat on the window side of the cushion and looked into the lens and everything.  She's good, is Deeley.  She eats carpets, but for the most part she's pretty good.

Ah, beautiful!  Well done Deeley.

...Marsha.  Go AWAY.

Vintage-style Kaleidoscope Quilt Top

And here it is - a finished quilt top.  I'm quite pleased with this one!  The soft muted colours work really well together, especially with the white sashing to make it all pop a bit.

I'm less pleased with the fact my camera seems to have gone a bit peculiar - the bottom part of that photo is in focus but the top isn't?  And the depth of field (technical terminology, get me) isn't huge, so...  I don't know.  I shall have to get Tom to have a look at it this evening.

The quilt top meanwhile will be put away for a bit, since I have far too many other things I need to get on with.  Hopefully I can come back to it before too long and get it basted up and quilted.

A Few Blocks

These are paper-pieced string blocks for what will be a vintagey-looking Kaleidoscope quilt.  In a spirit of stashbusting, because I have a lot of sad, neglected stash from back when I started buying quilting fabrics which isn't... quite... to my current tastes.

As ever with stash quilts, I ended up supplementing things with a few small new purchases - but they were vintage!  A bag of real actual vintage scraps for £5!   Several of them shriveled alarmingly under my iron and revealed themselves to be not actually cotton, but all the rest I used.  Gosh, I'm so thrifty!  And not a sucker at all.